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is a deeply intimate and socially personal medium.

Radio is the most intimate and socially personal medium in the world. Harry von Zell

is a medium that you need not completely surrender yourself to, in contrast to television which is all-enveloping and requires that you fully give yourself over to it.

The thing about radio is that it's got an intimate feel. What I like is that you don't have to give it your full attention - you can still do something else that the same time, whereas TV is all-enveloping: you have to sit there and pay attention to it, and give yourself over to it. You have to surrender to it, but you don't with radio. Jarvis Cocker

is a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, force-feeding us music regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

'As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: 'Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless'... it 'force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,' with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, 'regardless whether we want to hear it,' it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.' Milan Kundera, Ignorance

is an intensely visual medium: Information that reaches the listener through other senses is, through the immense richness of spoken language, instantly converted into visual terms.

Martin Esslin, who worked closely with Beckett on his BBC productions and has written extensively on the radio plays, argues that 'radio is an intensely visual medium. . . . Information that reaches [the listener] through other senses is instantly converted into visual terms. And aural experiences, which include the immense richness of language as well as musical and natural sound, are the most effective means of triggering visual images.'

is an uncluttered medium... because it is so hopeless at delivering data, it succeeds in offering the basic story without the detailed trappings.

The fact that radio is so hopeless at delivering data makes it an uncluttered medium, offering the basic story without the detailed trappings. But it does mean that if data is important, radio is probably not your place. Evan Davis

is at a dramatic medium, at its best when it takes its indeterminacy and absence into account by engaging in a dialectic of disclosure and obstacle, information and noise, in which the soundscape provides conflicting, and hence tantalizing, testimony.

As a dramatic medium, radio is at its best when it takes this indeterminacy and absence into account. After All That Fall, whose characters are still represented as 'real' people in a 'real' Irish country setting, Beckett's radio art becomes more abstract and mediumistic, engaging in a dialectic of disclosure and obstacle, information and noise, in which the soundscape -- which includes silence-- provides conflicting, and hence tantalizing, testimony.

is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done.

Radio is called a medium because it is rare that anything is well done. Fred Allen

is different than fiction in that fiction, even mediocre fiction, needs purpose, a driving question... radio does not.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question. Ira Glass

radio, n.Trivia

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